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Seagate New Barracuda XT 3TB Review

Testing:

Testing of hard drives can be done in a couple different ways. One is to leave the drive bare and hook it up as a secondary drive in an already existing system, so that you can see the theoretical peaks in performance followed by a cleaning of the drive after each benchmark run is complete. The second method, and the one OverclockersClub employs, is to load the operating system and benchmarking suite onto the drive being tested. This more closely emulates how the drive will be used so that the performance results are real world, not simply best case scenario results that you may never see unless operating the drive as a bare drive. Testing will be completed with the P67-based system listed below with a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit updated to SP1 and fully patched as of the date of the testing. The latest Intel Rapid Storage technology drivers and software have been installed for this testing, with all tests run on the native SATA 6Gb/s ports on the P67-based motherboard. The connection to the drive from the motherboard is with a 6Gb/s SATA cable. This drive was tested on the platform listed below and was formatted using a GUID Partition Table to take advantage of the entire drive capacity for testing.